Curses! Foiled yet again by the Red Sox

The Curse killed our fathers. Now it is coming for us.

Every year it is the same thing. The Red Sox have broken our hearts every fall since we reached the age of reason and put our tiny behinds on the hard wooden seats at Fenway Park. Since 1918 (you can look it up) they have failed us. And the reason is almost always the damned Yankees.

Here we consider the Red Sox-Yankees games a tremendous rivalry. What a joke.

As Tony Kornheiser said on ESPN radio last week, “That would be like considering a hammer and a nail a rivalry. Does the hammer consider the nail to be a rival?”

Sad, but true. Since 1901 the Yanks and Red Sox have played a total of 1,846 games. One team has won 55 percent of them, or 1,014. Guess who? When the Yankees won their first World Series in 1923, it was with help from 11 former Red Sox, including one player named Babe Ruth.

That was just the beginning.

In 1949, the Red Sox went into New York needing to win only one of two games for the pennant. The Yankees won both. In 1978, the Red Sox led the Yankees by 14 games on July 20, but blew it all, and wound up losing to the Yankees in a one-game playoff won on a home run by Reggie Jackson even if most people give credit to (bleeping) Bucky Dent. The hated Yankees lead the Red Sox 4-1 in playoff games.

Now that some of us have turned 60, we have all sworn that they will never get us again, never break our aging hearts in the fading sunlight of late September. We will not play Charlie Brown trying to kick the football any longer. We are adults. It’s time to act like it.

The sad truth: The Red Sox will not win it all in our lifetimes.

Besides, the Yankees have won three World Series in a row and added Mike Mussina to a Hall of Fame starting pitching lineup of Roger Clemens (ptui), Andy Pettite and Orlando Hernandez. They have a movie-plot rookie in Alfonso Soriano who is much too good to be true, just like Derek Jeter. Four in a row, coming up. The Yankees will win 100 games and then leave the Sox behind by, oh, at least 20.

That was Friday.

That was before the Red Sox hosted the Yankees for the first series of the year. The Sox took three out of four.

The Easter Sunday game was six innings old when I was driving home from a funeral. The Sox were down a run and needed my help. I stopped at the first place with a television. The fact that the Navigator Lounge sold cold beer was an afterthought. With my help, they won a close one, 5-4.

The phone rang on Patriots Day about 8 a.m. Who would call at that hour? It was John, another 60-year-old who had taken the pledge this year that we would leave the Red Sox behind and get on with our lives.

“We are going all the way this year,” were the first words out of his lips. He admitted he could not help himself, even if he was born in Alabama. It’s not like you are born with The Curse. If you stay in New England long enough and have a passing interest in baseball, it will get you. Like drug pushers they get you when you are young.

Fathers tell your children, not to do what we have done. Once you put that “B” hat on your kid’s head he or she is doomed for life.

I have an excuse. I was born in Kenmore Square, a long fly ball from Fenway Park. If memory serves, the hospital was turned into a hotel where Yankees stayed for ball games. But I am postponing my complete fervor.

I will not succumb again. I will not lose it completely for the damn Red Sox again.

Not until at least July 4th.